Chapter VIII: Confucius

There was still a half-hour of sunshine after we left the ghostly Lamas, so we went to pay a call on Confucius, who dwells in the same quarter,--the same necropolis, one might say,--in an abandonment equally depressing.

The big worm-eaten door slips off its hinges and falls down as we attempt to enter, and an owl who was asleep there takes fright and flies away. Behold us in a sort of mortuary wood, walking over the brown autumn grass.

A triumphal arch is the first thing we come across, built to pay homage to some great Chinese thinker. It is of a charming design, although very peculiar, with three little bell-towers of yellow enamel, which crown the whole, their curved roofs decorated with monsters at each one of the corners.

It stands there like some precious bibelot lost among the ruins. Its freshness is surprising where all else is so dilapidated. One realizes its great age from the archaic nature of its details; but it is made of such enduring materials that the wear and tear of centuries in this dry climate has not affected it. The base is white marble, the rest is of faience,--faience both yellow and green, with lotus leaves, clouds, and chimæras in bold relief.

Farther on is a large rotunda which gives evidence of extreme antiquity; this appears to be the color of dirt or ashes, and is surrounded by a moat where the lotus and the reeds are dying. This is a retreat where wise men may come to meditate upon the vanities of life; the object of the moat is to isolate it and make it more quiet.

It is reached by an arched bridge of marble, with railings that vaguely suggest a succession of animals' heads. Inside, it is deserted, abandoned, crumbling away, and the gold ceiling is full of birds' nests. A really magnificent desk is left, with an arm-chair and a table. It seems as though a kind of fine clay had been scattered by handfuls over everything; the ground is covered with it too, so that one's feet sink into it and one's steps are muffled. We soon discover that there is still a carpet underneath, and that it is really nothing but dust which has been accumulating for centuries,--the thick and ever-present dust which the Mongolian winds blow across Pekin.

After a short walk under the old trees we reach the temple itself, which is preceded by a court surrounded by tall marble pillars. This looks exactly like a cemetery, and yet there are no dead lying under these stele, which are there merely to glorify the memory of the departed. Philosophers who in bygone centuries made this region illustrious by their presence and by their dreams, profound thinkers, lost to us forever, have their names as well as some few of their most transcendent utterances, perpetuated on these stele.

On either side of the white steps leading to the sanctuary, blocks of marble are arranged in the form of a tam-tam. These are so old as to make one's head swim; and upon them maxims intelligible only to a few erudite mandarins have been written in primitive Chinese characters, in letters contemporary with and sisters to the hieroglyphs of Egypt.

This is the temple of disinterestedness, of abstract thought, and of cold speculation. One is struck at once by its absolute simplicity, for which, up to this point, nothing in China has prepared us. Very large, very high as to ceilings, very grand and of a uniform blood-red color, it is magnificently empty and supremely quiet. The columns and walls are red, with a few discreet decorations in gold, dimmed by time and dust. In the centre is a bouquet of gigantic lotus in a colossal vase, and that is all. After the profusion, the debauch of monsters and idols, the multiplication of human and animal forms in the usual Chinese pagoda, this absence of figures of any sort is a comfort and a relief.

In the niches all along the wall there are stele, red like the rest of the place, and consecrated to the memory of persons still more eminent than those of the entrance court, with quotations from their writings carved upon them. The stele of Confucius himself, which is larger than the others, and has longer quotations, occupies the position of honor in the centre of this severe Pantheon, and is placed on a kind of altar.

Properly speaking, this is not a temple; it is not a place for prayer or service. It is rather an academy, a meeting-place for calm, philosophic discussion. In spite of its dust and its abandoned air, it seems that newly elected members of the Academy of Pekin (which is even more than our own the conservator of form and ceremony, I am assured) are still bound to give a conference here.

Besides various maxims of renunciation and wisdom written from top to bottom of the stele, Confucius has left to this sanctuary certain thoughts on literature which have been engraved in letters of gold in such a way as to form pictures hung on the walls.

Here is one which I transcribe for young western scholars who are preoccupied with classification and inquiry. They will find in it a reply twice two thousand years old to one of their favorite questions: "The literature of the future will be the literature of compassion."

* * * * *

It is almost five o'clock when the gloomy, red, autumn sun goes down behind great China on Europe's side, and we leave the temples and the grove behind. I separate from my companions, for they live in the legation quarter in the southern part of the Tartar City, while I go to the Imperial City, far from here.

I have no idea how to get out of this dead region, all new to me, where we have spent the day, and through the lonely labyrinthine streets of Pekin. I have as a guide a "mafou," who has been lent to me, and I only know that I have more than a mile to go before reaching my sumptuous, deserted quarters.

My companions gone, I walk for a few moments in the silent old uninhabited streets before reaching one of the long, broad avenues where blue cotton dresses and long-queued yellow faces begin to appear. There is an interminable row of low houses, wretched, gray things, on either side of the street, where the tramp of horses raises the black friable dust in infectious clouds.

The street is so wide and the houses so low that almost the whole of the twilight sky is visible above our heads; and so suddenly does the cold come on after sunset that in a moment we freeze.

The crowds are dense about the food-shops, and the air is fetid in the neighborhood of the butchers, where dog-meat and roasted grasshoppers are sold. But what good nature in all these people of the streets, who on the day after battle and bombardment permit me to pass without so much as an evil look! What could I do, with my borrowed "mafou" and my revolver, if my appearance did not happen to please them?

For a time after this we are alone in desolate, ruined quarters of the town. According to the position of the pale, setting sun, it seems to me that we are on the right track; but if my "mafou," who speaks nothing but Chinese, has not understood me, I shall be in a predicament.

* * * * *

The return journey in the cold seems interminable to me. At last, however, the artificial mountain of the imperial park is silhouetted in gray on the sky ahead of us, with the little faience kiosks and the twisted trees grouping themselves like scenes painted on lacquer. We reach one of the yellow enamelled gates of the blood-red wall surrounding the Imperial City, where two sentinels of the allied armies present arms. From here I know my way, I am at home; so I dismiss my guide and proceed alone to the Yellow City, from which at this hour no one is allowed to depart.

The Imperial, the Yellow, the Forbidden City, encircled by its own terrible walls in the very heart of great Pekin, with its Babylonian environment, is a park rather than a city, a wood of venerable trees,--sombre cypresses and cedars,--several leagues in circumference. Some ancient temples peep through the branches, and several modern palaces built according to the fancies of the Empress regent. This great forest, to which I return to-night as if it were my home, has at no former period of history been known to foreigners; even ambassadors have never passed its gates; until recently it has been absolutely inaccessible and profoundly unknown to Europeans.

This Yellow City surrounds and protects with its tranquil shadows the still more mysterious Violet City, the residence of the Son of Heaven, which occupies a commanding square in the centre of it, protected by moats and double ramparts.

What silence reigns here at this hour! What a lugubrious region it is! Death hovers over these paths where formerly princesses passed in their palanquins and empresses with their silk-robed followers. Now that the usual inhabitants have fled and Occidental barbarians have taken their places, one meets no one in the woods, unless it be an occasional patrol or a few soldiers of one nation or another, and only the sentinels' step is heard before palace or temple, or the cries of the crows and the barking of dogs about the dead.

I have to cross a region filled with trees, nothing but trees,--trees of a truly Chinese contour, whose aspect is in itself quite sufficient to give one the sharp realization of exile; the road goes on under the deep shadow of the branches that turn the twilight into night. Belated magpies are hopping about on the withered grass, and the crows, too, their croakings exaggerated by the cold and the silence. At the end of a quarter of an hour a corner of the Violet City appears, just at a turn of the road. She slowly reveals herself, silent, closed, like a colossal tomb. Her long, straight walls are lost in the confusion and obscurity of the distance. As I draw nearer to her the silence seems to be intensified, as though it grew as she broods over it.

One corner of the Lake of the Lotus begins to come out like a bit of mirror placed among the reeds to receive the last reflections of the sky. I must pass along its edges in front of the Island of Jade, which is approached by a marble bridge; and I know in advance, because I have seen it daily, the horrible grimace in store for me from the two monsters who have guarded the bridge for centuries.

At length I emerge from the shadow and oppression of the trees into open space with the clear sky overhead, leaving the lake behind me. The first stars are appearing, indicating another of the nights that pass here in an excess of solitude and silence, with only an occasional gunshot to break the tragic calm of wood and palace.

The Lake of the Lotus, which during the season of flowers must be the marvellous field of pink blossoms described by the poets of China, is now, at the end of October, only a melancholy swamp covered with brown leaves, from which at this hour a wintry mist rises that hangs like a cloud over the dead reeds.

My dwelling is on the other side of the lake; and now I have reached the Marble Bridge which spans it with a beautiful curve,--a curve that stands out white in spite of the darkness.

At this point a corpse-like smell greets my nostrils. For a week I have known whence it comes,--from a person in a blue gown lying with outspread arms, face downward, on the slimy shore; and ten steps farther on his comrade is lying in the grass.

As soon as I cross the beautiful lonely Marble Bridge through the pale cloud that hangs over the water I shall be almost home. At my left is a faience gateway guarded by two German sentinels,--two living beings whom I shall not be sorry to see,--who will salute me in automatic unison; this will be at the entrance to the garden where Field-Marshal von Waldersee resides, in one of the Empress's palaces.

Two hundred metres farther on, after passing more gates and more ruins, I shall come to a fresh opening in an old wall, which will be my entrance, guarded by one of our own men,--an African chasseur. Another of the Empress's palaces is there concealed by its surroundings,--a frail palace, almost wholly enclosed in glass. Once there, I push open a glass door decorated with pink lotus flowers, and find again my nightly fairyland, where priceless porcelains, cloisonné, and lacquer stand about in profusion on the yellow carpets under the wonderfully carved arches of ebony.